Scully felt the landscape shift around her and she gripped the alien's hand tighter. Feeling her feet settle on solid ground, she looked about her and shrank against the green-skinned spirit. "When you said Christmas past, did you mean LONG past?" The alien followed Scully's gaze as it answered, "Not long past...your past. But I see the problem. I seem to have overshot a bit." Scully raised an eyebrow, "Yeah, just a bit."
Running and ducking from the snapping, snarling jaws of the two-headed dinosaur, the spirit lifted them both into the air and a cool mist surrounded them as they were transported once more. This time when they settled to the ground, Scully immediately felt a sense of familiarity. She knew this place. She had been a child here. Letting the alien's hand go, she walked around the forest clearing to get her bearings. Yes, she was certain of it. This had been a favorite haunt of her and her brothers' when they were growing up. As the memories flooded into her head, she was distracted by the sound of a young girl crying. Moving through the trees, Scully found the source of the sound. There before her was a young girl, head bent as her red hair fell around her face. Scully's feet felt rooted to the ground. The child was a younger version of herself.
"Do you recognize the girl," asked the big-eyed alien. "Yes. It's me as a child but how can that be? What is this, spirit?" Pointing to the weeping child and the surrounding forest, the spirit alien explained, "This is a Christmas from the past. You are doomed tonight to revisit these moments from your past as was foretold."
Scully slowly walked toward the child. The girl was cradling the dead snake in her hands as if she could transfer some of her own brilliantly shining life into the lifeless remains. Her regret was evident in her exquisite sorrow. As she watched the child, Dana remembered the incident. She had been out playing with her brothers and, in an attempt to prove to them that she wasn't just a kid and should be allowed to play with them even if she was a girl, she had shot the snake. But no sooner had the ringing of the shot dissipated from the forest than Scully had recoiled in horror from what she had done. She had taken a life. An innocent creature - one of god's creatures - and she had chosen to render it lifeless. Her regret was immediate and inconsolable. She remembered her brothers trying to talk to her then leaving her to her misery. And this is how Scully found her now.
Reaching out to touch the child, Scully was startled by the voice of the alien. "You cannot speak to her or comfort her. These visions you see are only shadows of things that have been. They cannot see or hear us." Tears formed in Dana's eyes as she looked down on the bowed head of the child she once was. Regret for the incident was reborn within her and she longed to be taken from this place. As she raised her head to beg such a thing from the spirit, she felt the coolness of the mists close around them once more and the landscape seemed to shift.
As the misty haze dispersed, Scully realized they were outside an apartment complex that she had lived in not long ago. It had been the first place she leased when she had taken her post in Washington, D.C. following her move from Quantico. With sudden anticipation she realized that this Christmas had been the last she had spent with her father before his death. Eager to look upon him once more she entered the building as the alien spirit followed close behind.
Before her stood the brightly decorated tree with an angel perched on top. In the kitchen, her mother washed dishes at the sink while Dana cleared the remaining dessert dishes from the table. And there, standing at the mantle as he admired the tree, was her father. He looked just as she remembered him; just as she pictured him on the many occasions she mourned his passing and dreamed of the past. He looked so commanding even when he wasn't in uniform. Tears welled in Scully's eyes. He had asked about her work on that Christmas Eve, trying in a small way to show her that despite her choice against a career as a doctor, he was still proud. It had been a difficult choice but Scully had been sure that choosing the FBI was the right path. But more difficult than the choice itself, was breaking the news to her parents and hoping for their approval. Especially necessary to the younger Dana was the approval and respect of her father.
Seeing her parents together again was a mixture of pleasure and pain. She missed her father so much. As the tears streamed down her face, Scully turned away from the image of this Christmas past and begged the alien to relieve her from this memory. "Please, let this night and its journey be over. Let me not look upon a past I cannot return to, I beg you."